The customer experience of webchat

Working through a complex web site can be a painful experience as you try to navigate through pages and understand tabs with varying degrees of guidance. The availability of web chat on sites has increased allowing some human interaction to your online journey. Webchat presents itself as a reactive tool to awaiting you to click through to some interactive text chat with a willing operator. Proactive web chat hovers in the background waiting to pounce on you when you look lost or close to leaving a purchase process kicking in a communication channel to keep you online. Both are delivering multi-channel experiences and building on the digital customer flavour. Webchat doesn't end with mere web site integration through as companies need to consider how this impacts on operations and hooks into other information sources to give a joined up experience. Mistakes can be made in simply bolting on an external webchat provider to a website without considering these dimensions. Lots of opportunity for an epic fail. 

The customer experience of entering a half ironman

January brings a flood of good intentions as people give up booze and chocolate and embark upon fitness regimes that from the outset are doomed to fail. It also sparks interest in what can be achieved in the forthcoming new year full of hope and ambition. Endurance athletes look upon the new year as a chance to set some new targets and select which events will shape their year picking off their "A" race. The "A" race is the big one, the one that you build towards with all the others ne'er stepping stones to this pinnacle of effort. For those looking at triathlons the ironman and half ironman events (such as www.cotswold113.com) tempt year after year. Stepping up to these distances brings most out in a sweat at the mere thought of it.  With half ironman faced with a 1.9km swim followed by 90km bike and finished off with a 20km run simple maths leads you to what the full ironman entails by doubling these scary numbers. Entering the event for the first time involved extensive procrastination as you try to get your head around how exercising for 6 or 14 hours respectively might feel?   Nothing helps give you a frame of reference even of having lesser distances in the same field. As a customer you ponder the checkout page and the point of no return for entering knowing that this will start a road of pain and commitment straining work and personal relationships along the way not to mention financial drain to equip you for this. The result could be epic but at the point of entering the feeling is anything but. 

The customer experience of visa applications

Travelling to various corners of the globe on business results in some additional steps over and above packing your passport and sun cream with many countries taking a deeper look at who they let in the country. Around the EU these limitations seem foreign to us but step outside this "circle of trust" and you enter a world of questions and forms. The process itself can be daunting with various online steps to follow with letters and photographs required that has generated an industry in its own right as companies have sprung up to help you navigate your way through this unscathed. The websites often feel misaligned with the companies ambitions being very dated and hark back to the dawn of the interweb with crude navigation and customer journeys. The steps often require back to basics printouts with mountains of paperwork compiled to be packaged off to some dark secret office. The questions asked probe deep into your background exploring the lives of you and you family. In a relatively settled period in world affairs it strikes you as somewhat excessive when the purpose of your trip is likely to benefit the local economy. Visa applications. Not an epic experience. 

The customer experience of January traffic

As a paying customer of the UK road network January is not a great month so far and if there was a feedback form to be filled in mine would be pretty negative with harsh comment throughout. Following weeks of floods the pressure on the main commuter road network is at a peak and journeys that should be taking 30 minutes stretch well into one to two hours during the commuter rush. As a customer you feel the full range of emotions stepping through the following wave - 

1st - Disbelief

It cannot possibly be bad again and this is just a blip for something minor. It will get better. 

2nd - Rage 

It can be that bad again as you realise your life is passing before you stuck at the junction while nobody will let you out. 

3rd - Panic 

Wherever you were going you are not going to get there when you hoped and you are going to be late 

4th - Resignation 

Finally admitting defeat you accept your fate and that no matter how many cheeky short cuts and back routes you use it is futile and you are stuck  

The customer experience of mobile gaming

As the new Xbox 1 and Sony PS4 have now arrived and gaming fans go nuts over the newly released favourites other formats continue to thrive with mobile gaming not fading anytime soon. The hardcore gamer may mock the disposable mobile gaming genre but it offers a cheap (often free) quick thrill that has even broken into mainstream movies, the Free Birds movie?  Continuous reference to the original mobile app game giant that has reached millions - Angry Birds. While the graphics on smart phones may not match the processor power of a dedicated games machine on a screen sub 5 inches the thrills are plenty sufficient and the pace of gameplay amazing. Indeed with touch screen gaming the experience can be much more immersive learning from the well established Nintendo DS school of gaming which built the experience on titles such as Warioware. Gaming on a phone is quick and at its heart fun. For distracting me while suffering public transport it goes down as epic in my book. 

The customer experience of a trip to the cinema

A trip to the movies used to be a pretty cheap date with an opportunity to indulge in some treats while gorging yourself on widescreen surround sound loveliness. The price for tickets has spiralled to make a family trip to the pictures leaving little change from a £50 note. Ticket prices have shot up as have refreshments if you elect to quench your thirst and hunger while at the flicks. With drinks at more than £3 you are close to the price of a pint in the pub. The cinema experience is much the same as it has been for the past decade with digital imagery improving quality but in essence the experience is the same. Slightly squashed seats with a compromised view from the persons head in front with careful seating selection to avoid the trauma of sitting near to some noisy family of ten who have a family bag of Doritos to munch through. Assuming your movie selection is worthwhile it still represents an epic experience you cannot recreate at home but choose a stinker and it could feel like a very costly mistake. 

The customer experience of job boards emails

As the new year gets its grip on us and working life returns to normal the recruitment business ramps up its communications to try and entice us away from our jobs into new exciting careers. Inboxes are filled with emails promising a brave new world through a new career to those who have become irritated by the commute already in 2014 and eager for a change. The emails in general are a lazy non-targeted affair trying to drive traffic to their websites where you register and explore in more depth what is on offer. The emails offer a degree of tailoring to their recipient but it is a very wide sweep to gather people up putting everyone under an umbrella of IT or HR or whichever discipline you work within. These emails go relatively unnoticed for much of the year but in January you can't help be affected as the volume of them has ramped up and you receive such a large number of them. Recruitment firms need to improve the CRM that is behind these to risk potential customers hitting the dreaded "unsubscribe" link and losing them for the future.